Thursday, December 19, 2013

Phil Anderson 90th Birthday Symposium

The workshop to honor Anderson, the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics,
Emeritus, and a senior physicist, was held Dec. 14 and 15 at the Frick
Chemistry Laboratory on campus. About 150 colleagues and former
students from as far away as India and Japan attended, as well as five
fellow Nobel Prize winners and one Fields Medal recipient. The
gathering was organized by N. Phuan Ong, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton, and Piers Coleman, professor of physics at Rutgers University.

Anyone who has followed this blog for a while would have seen me mentioned Anderson's name a few times. He, of course, had a huge role to play in the formulation of the Higgs mechanism. And the discovery that bears his name, the Anderson Localization, has been a ubiquitous presence in condensed matter physics. But of course, he also championed the notion that More Is Different, an influential essay that started other physicists to question the reductionism philosophy.

The general public may not know him, but he has inserted his influence into our modern world.